If Google says it, it must be true…

By Bwog Staff on
May 12, 200620 Comments

A few days ago Google introduced a new feature called “Trends” that allows users to view statistics about the search queries that Google fields by the millions every day. And finally, we have proof that Columbia actually is more important than its ivied brethren.

A comparison by volume of the search term “columbia university” versus “harvard university” et al., and “columbia” versus “harvard,” etc., reveals that Columbia is well ahead on both counts (and it’s assigned us a fitting color).

@butwhat but what does this really mean? Fewer people can remember our web address than harvard’s? Why would anyone search for “Columbia University” — isn’t it obvious that the address is going to be columbia.edu?!

@The Campus Drunk (one of many) “Columbia” means a lot of different things– if we’re talking about the school we’re attending, we should really only count “Columbia University”. Harvard University, on the other hand, is pretty much the only thing with the name “Harvard,” so whenever anyone mentions it, it’s usually as “Harvard” and not “Harvard University”. Thus the search really isn’t a fair fight– search “Harvard” versus “Columbia University” and you’ll get markedly different results.

@M.R. What’s incredibly sad is I already did this about 2 years ago. The problem is that “Columbia University” generates a ton of non-columbia hits on just the first page. The next two hits when you search with quotes
-University of Missouri-Columbia
-University of British Columbia

@moph i can only partly agree. The problem is that Columbia is a Latin word that was popular as a name for things, over a period of time. So Columbia Sportswear, Columbia Records, the Columbia Encyclopedia, Columbia House, etc etc etc, are ALL purposely trying to get their name in the rankings. Harvard, on the other hand, is a family name.

@re:joinder the way it calculates that is screwy. from the google page: When the Cities tab is selected, Google Trends first looks at a sample of all Google searches to determine the cities from which we received the most searches for your first term. Then, for those top cities, Google Trends calculates the ratio of searches for your term coming from each city divided by total Google searches coming from the same city. The city ranking you see on the page and the bar charts alongside each city name both represent this ratio.

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